The Fall of the Year (10 page)

I laughed and put my arm around her shoulder. “You love everything about the circus, don't you, sweetheart?”

“I do,” Molly said. Then she said, “Frank? Are you really going into the seminary to be a priest like Father George?”

“Probably. I guess so.”

She looked at me hard with her intense green eyes. “And we'd still be best friends?”

“Sure.”

Molly nodded. “That's good,” she said. “Because even if you never marry me, I can stand it if you don't marry anyone else and we stay best friends. Oh! Look.”

Nearby, the Countess had begun warming up on a small trampoline. In her black leotard, with her heavy blond hair in a ponytail, her fine features, and her sparkling teeth, she looked like a veteran movie actress. But her eyes were remote and expressionless and trained on the faraway distance, as though looking for something she'd given up hope of seeing, something she looked for out of habit alone, in much the same way she did flip after flip on the trampoline, without thinking about what she was doing.

Molly edged closer. “I'm sorry about your daughter,” she said. The Countess didn't reply.

“I can do three flips off the flying trapeze,” Molly offered. “Probably four.”

“Please not to stand so close,” the Countess said without interrupting her workout. “No insure.”

“No insure is right,” said Slade, who'd appeared from nowhere accompanied by a large monkey, black with a white face. “What did I tell you about no redheaded scalawags pestering the Zempenskis? Do you want me to revoke them passes?”

Molly bent over and extended her fingers to the monkey, which stood up on its hind legs and solemnly shook hands with her.

“This gentleman is a white-faced Kilimanjaro monkey, performs on the high wire with the Zempenskis,” Slade said, as the monkey ran up the center pole and scampered across the high wire. “It's a climbing fool, if you want the truth. They have it with Lloyd's for ten thousand dollars—you'll see why at the matinee. Meantime, I imagine you're going to the parade?”

 

The circus parade started at the southeast end of the common. It came lurching up the east side of the green past the railroad station, the courthouse, and the Academy, turned jerkily onto the short street between the north end of the common and the hotel, swung down the west side past the brick shopping block, then hooked back along the south end of the green to complete the circuit. Three times the parade circumambulated the common: a sorry little progression nothing at all like the mile-long cavalcade promised on the advance posters. But what the grand free parade of the Last Railway Extravaganza and Greatest Little Show on Earth lacked in size and splendor, it more than made up for in its sweet small idiosyncrasies and a certain brave razzmatazz, staggering along under the direction of the benignly cynical Slade, in spite of every conceivable di-fugalty.

The procession was led by a blue bandwagon pulled by Rudyard, on whose back, in a rickety howdah, sat the big Kilimanjaro monkey. The four-piece band consisted of a saxophone, a trumpet, a slide trombone, and a gleaming sousaphone played by none other than the versatile Mr. Slade, in a major-domo's uniform with a tall beaver hat like a palace guard's. Behind the bandwagon walked the one-eyed roustabout, now wearing a turban and whapping, at arrhythmic intervals, a bass drum. Around his neck was a placard that said “150-Year-Old Drummer Boy and Parsee.”

Straggling behind the elderly drummer boy were the Four Horses of the Apocalypse, each pulling a float. First came the Bestiary of Antipodean Rarities. Reposing at the feet of a roustabout in a big-game hunter's leather hat were a dark-maned Nubian lion, looking suspiciously like an emaciated tame puma with a few dollops of black paint splashed on its scrawny neck; a rare Tibetan ram that bore more than a passing resemblance to Bumper Stevens's evil-tempered old billy goat, Satan; the twenty-six-foot-long Pythoness Sapienta, stretched out in the sunshine inert as a fire hose; and a Nile river horse, a Cape buffalo, and a white rhino, all three of which appeared to be stuffed.

On the next wagon were the sideshow performers from the Hippodrome of Grotesqueries. Arrayed upon packing crates or squatting in the straw strewn over the wagon bed were the fire eater's replacement, the sword swallower, the armless-legless child, and the beautiful half-ton giantess with golden curls. They were followed on a third float by the Flying Zempenskis, doing a mechanical routine of handstands, pyramids, and flips. Three clowns, dressed as a jester, a tramp, and a rube farmer, capered on a fourth wagon to the band's bright and discordant rendition of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

The bass drum boomed and vibrated from one end of the village to the other. The pungency of the circus animals was sharp on the air; and the entire parade had about it a picture-book quality. For a few minutes that morning, as I stood with Father George on the cracked slate sidewalk in front of the hotel, watching this strange conjunction of the wondrous and the absurd thrice circle the village green as if weaving an ancient spell over the town, I was caught up in its old, shabby glory, and my heart beat a little faster.

“Where's Molly?” Father George said suddenly, looking around.

“I'm not her keeper, you know.”

“Well, if you aren't, I don't know who the hell is,” Father George said, his face getting red. “By the bald-headed baby Jesus, Frank, I thought I told you—oh, no!”

And he began to laugh.

I looked in the direction he was pointing. As Rudyard headed up the west side of the green for his third and final circuit, a girlish figure with a bright red ponytail appeared on his back in front of the monkey's howdah. Having evidently dropped onto the elephant from the drooping branches of an overhanging elm, she stood now on one foot, now on the other, now on her hands. Finally she danced on the elephant's back with the monkey while the band played and the crowd laughed and clapped and cheered, as though nothing that they had seen thus far could exceed, for sheer bravado and hoopla, the escapades of our hometown tomboy and daredevil, Molly Murphy.

 

“Acting up,” the Commoners called Molly's behavior when she was younger. Once she appeared at the Big House in a homemade green spaceman's costume. “Come quick, Frank. I just told Welcome Kinneson a man from Mars was going to land on the roof of Ben Currier's sugarhouse at high noon.”

Or, while she was playing flies-and-grounders with a gang of us village boys on the Common, and Louvia DeBanville appeared with her enormous reticule: “Louvia! I dreamed that the world is going to end tonight at the stroke of midnight. What should I wear for the event?”

Molly teased me, too, from the time I was ten and she was six, the way a younger sister teases a big brother: constantly and devilishly, tagging after me everywhere, horning in on my ball games and fishing excursions, inventing any number of objectionable nicknames for me at the same time that she swore she would marry me “before I marry anyone else in Kingdom Common.” And woe betide Molly Murphy's enemies in the village. Long before she was a teenager, she was more feared for her merciless tongue than Louvia herself.

Even the auction-barn gang respected her. Actually, she was a great favorite with them because she cooked up her own escapades, most of which were far more imaginative than any that the town rowdies could have devised for her. At twelve, Molly became the first person in the history of the village to go over the High Falls of the Kingdom River behind the hotel in a barrel, choosing for her maiden voyage opening day of trout season, when the banks below the thundering cataract were lined with an audience of fishermen. Miraculously, she emerged from this performance with only a broken little finger, a cracked collarbone, and more bruises and contusions than Doc Harrison could remember seeing on anyone other than a few scarcely recognizable automobile and farm-machinery fatalities. Her parents tried to rein her in, to no avail. Two months later she swam the entire twenty-five-mile length of Lake Memphremagog. She rode standing up on the back of Ben Currier's prize racehorse as it galloped around the track at the county fairgrounds; and at every possible opportunity she practiced her flips off the high trestle near Irishtown, never doubting that when the time came, she would run off with the circus and become an aerialist.

 

“Where do you calculate she'll strike next?” Slade asked after I'd filled him in on Molly's history.

“I don't have any idea.”

“Well, be warned, Frank Bennett,” he said. “Next time your best friend and intended breaks out, I aim to prefer charges. Like Brother Beeb said just before heading West, enough is enough.”

He was standing with his head inside the workings of the merry-go-round, twisting something with a wrench as long as a Louisville Slugger. Nearby stood a crowd of expectant kids, marveling at the old-fashioned carousel with its strange company of mythical beasts. Chipped and faded, they were still recognizable as a sphinx, a gorgon, a basilisk, a Cyclops, two Furies, a three-headed Cerberus, a siren, and an assortment of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. Molly was perched astride Cerberus. But the merry-go-round refused to budge, and the steam calliope emitted only a puny whistle, like a sick teakettle.

“Thirty days on bread and water can work wonders for a young female felon,” Slade muttered into the frozen gears of the carousel.

He gave a last exasperated two-handed heave on the wrench, then looked up at the soaring courthouse tower, as though seeking consolation there. His eyes seemed to be following the progress of the century-old bittersweet vine that ascended the sheer south wall of the building, snaked along the ridgeline of the roof, then traced its way, in a delicate lacy green pattern, nearly up to the defunct clock on the west side of the tower.

“You can't imagine what a draw I'd be as the main attraction of your aerial show,” Molly wheedled.

From deep in the carousel's workings, Slade's voice said, “You can't imagine what a draw I'd be as ringmaster of Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey.”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than the merry-go-round gave a screeching howl and lurched into motion. The calliope broke into the strains of “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.” Wrench in hand, Slade tiptoed backward so as not to break the charm. The merry-go-round picked up speed as the calliope elided into a squawking rendition of “The Sidewalks of New York,” and the battered wooden monsters seemed to beam in the smoky sunshine.

“A thousand thank you's, gentle friend,” Molly said as she vaulted off Cerberus a few minutes later. “On to the Hippodrome, Frankie-boy!”

Inside the Hippodrome tent, the Grotesqueries lounged on trunks and packing crates, visiting companionably with a handful of spectators. They were dimly lighted by a single flood lamp attached to a pole. The air smelled of mildewed canvas.

Near the entrance, on a rounded wicker laundry hamper, sat the 150-year-old drummer boy and Parsee, formerly the oneeyed roustabout. The Pythoness Sapienta was draped over his shoulders, her little wedge-shaped head swaying gently from side to side, surveying the small crowd with sleepy curiosity. “Gaze into the eyes of death,” the Parsee said to Molly.

Before the snake handler had any idea what she was doing, Molly slipped in under the first several feet of the great somnolent Pythoness.

“Jesus, girlie, look out!” exclaimed the Parsee in an accent much closer to that of Indiana than of India.

“The eyes of death!” Molly said. She smiled at the snake's head, six inches from hers. “You go back to sleep, Sapienta.” She ducked out from under the constrictor's loops and said, “Do you need an assistant, Parsee darling?”

“I'll tell you what I don't need,” the one-eyed snake handler said. “I don't need no smart-alecker young gal bedeviling me at every turn. You clear out now or I'll holler for Brother Slade to run you off the lot.”

“Your threats don't frighten me in the least,” Molly said.

The Parsee gave her a sinister smile. “Do you want me to frighten you, Missy Know-All?”

He rummaged in his hamper and pulled out a gallon glass jar with a wide mouth. Inside, floating upside down in a clear liquid, was a deformed human fetus with webbed fingers and toes, a dorsal fin and a short tail.

“Old Grandpop's been putting up preserves,” the Parsee said. He unscrewed the lid, releasing the penetrating odor of formaldehyde. He lifted the deformed creature out of the jar and sat down on the hamper with the fetus on his knee. “Meet Nostradamus, girlie. The four-hundred-year-old infant prophet. Ask him a question, he'll give you an answer.”

“That's no prophet, it's a little child that didn't turn out right inside its mamma,” Molly shouted, jabbing her finger into the Parsee's chest.

She grabbed Nostradamus off the Parsee's knee and held him up to her face and looked deep into the slits where his eyes should have been. He was about as large as a cat, and a shocking instance of what can go wrong in the universe. “It's a bad thing they've done to you, little one,” Molly said. “I wish I could give you all the love your ma would have.”

She gently kissed Nostradamus's wizened gray cheek, eased him back into his jar, clapped on the lid, and shoved it hard into the Parsee's stomach. “As for you,” she shouted, “you should be electrocuted for making a spectacle of him.”

Not far from the Parsee and the Pythoness was the fire eater's replacement, a man with a gaping hole in the side of his skull. In a husky voice he explained that a crowbar had been driven completely through his cranium in a blasting accident in a West Virginia coal mine. He put down his gasoline-soaked fire-eating tongs, picked up the offending bar, and inserted it several inches into a hole above his right ear. “I read about you in
Ripley's
,” Molly said. “You're famous. Soon I will be, too.”